Before They Ever Book Anything
Last updated: August 2026
Ask someone where they are thinking of going on holiday this year and there is a decent chance they will tell you what an AI assistant suggested, before they mention a single travel brand.
That is a genuinely new habit, and it changes where the actual competition for a booking begins. It is not on your homepage. It is inside a conversation with ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, one that you are not present for unless the tool already knows enough about you to bring you up.
Three very different questions, three very different jobs for your content
Most travel brands write for one moment and quietly ignore the other two.
The dreaming question sounds like “Best coastal towns UK” or “Best family friendly cities in Europe.” Loose, exploratory, no commitment yet.
The planning question sounds like “Things to do in Whitstable in spring” or “Three nights in Lisbon for food lovers.” Someone has picked a place. Now they want detail.
The booking question sounds like “Whitstable hotels with parking.” Specific, practical, close to a decision.
Ask yourself honestly which of these your website actually answers well. For most travel brands, it is only the first one, the glossy, aspirational page, while the two moments that actually lead to revenue go largely unanswered. That gap is exactly where AI assistants step in and answer on your behalf, using whoever else happens to have written the content.
Where the answer actually comes from
When someone asks an AI tool “hikes a short flight from the UK for a long weekend,” the tool is not inventing an answer. It is drawing on a fairly identifiable pool: travel articles, digital PR coverage, major travel apps, review platforms, structured data, destination guides, and increasingly, casual chatter on forums like Reddit.
If you are nowhere in that pool, you are nowhere in the answer either, no matter how good the actual holiday you sell is.
The bit most travel brands haven’t clocked yet: agentic AI
There is a shift happening underneath all of this that is easy to miss. AI tools are moving from simply answering a question to actively doing things with the answer, comparing flights, building a rough itinerary, weighing up two destinations against each other, all inside the same conversation. This is often described as agentic AI, and it means the bar for “being visible” has moved. It is no longer enough to rank for a keyword. Your information needs to be clear and structured enough that a tool can confidently lift it into a plan it is assembling for someone, on the spot.
What actually helps, in practice
Write like the well-travelled friend, not the brochure. If someone is asking “is this worth it” or “what’s nearby,” answer that plainly near the top of the page, not three paragraphs into scene-setting.
Fill the gap most competitors leave open. Planning and booking stage content, the practical, specific stuff, is where you have the most room to stand out, precisely because so few travel brands bother writing it well.
Keep seasonal and local detail current. A page about “best time to visit” that has not been touched in two years reads as stale to a person and unreliable to an AI system checking for recency.
This is the opening move in a relationship with a future guest who does not know your name yet. Getting it right here is what earns you a place in the conversations that follow. If you would like help building content that AI assistants are confident enough to cite, our AI Marketing team can help.
Next: once the dreaming is done, how do people check whether it’s actually true? Read “Is This Hotel Actually Good?”
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